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Lights, Camera, Action!Article from Sound On Sound, December 1991 |
This issue features something of a new direction, with the first half of a 2-part series on shooting your own video - Paul Wiffen and Darrin Williamson present the muso's guide to the wonderful world of moving pictures on a budget. This subject is not quite within our usual remit, but I think it's a natural one to look at, and one that I suspect will be of interest to a great many of you.
The growth of the music video means that singles are almost invariably required to have an accompanying video. If you're in a band and trying to get noticed, a video of your music will tend to make a better impression on a record company than an audio tape. Even if your aspirations aren't so commercial, video can still be a fascinating and rewarding medium, and one that complements music extraordinarily well. Most of us enjoy watching TV or sitting in front of a movie screen, and have a yen to play Cecil B. de Mille. On top of this, the availability of video recording and editing technology is becoming ever wider, prices are dropping, and the quality of 'domestic' and 'semi-pro' equipment is approaching or even equalling that of some 'pro' equipment.
Sounds familiar? It's just like the boom in home recording. A major difference is that it's an awful lot harder to make a film or video that combines decent visuals with a good soundtrack than it is to record a piece of music to a similar level of competence. However, hi-tech musicians have a head start here: we already know about sound and music, and should know a thing or two about timecode. Better still, anyone who knows sequencers, digital effects, multitrack tape recorders and mixing desks is unlikely to be daunted by the technology of video.
Anyway, enough of that. There are new directions in music software too - in Martin Russ's review of Frohlich's Freestyle software this month, he observed that auto-accompaniment seems to be quite a theme of the early '90s. Certainly it looks as if the programs are growing up, and quite by chance this month's Shape Of Things To Come has news of two more 'session partner' programs. Steinberg's Tango promises to be particularly good - I had a chance to see it in action recently, and it certainly has the feel of a program written by a musician for musicians. If a sequencer is MIDI's equivalent of the tape recorder, then Tango is a band; that's a gross over-simplification of course, but in broad terms the analogy holds. Powerful though our current generation of software is, a sequencer still does what you tell it and nothing more; the signs are that quite different types of composition tools await us in the near future.
Editorial by Paul Ireson
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